Friday Music

Sarah Vaughan and Stardust

Revenge Shags

Louise Mensch is a British conservative politician whose politics are certainly not mine.  She does, however, share my gender and thus the usual trollish commentary on women in the public eye.  That commentary is based on sexuality, looks and the sluttiness or  f***ability of a particular woman.

But there's also more than a hint of true nastiness in some of it:

UPDATE: I’ve just had my attention brought to an article published on Vice.com yesterday titled Question of International Worker’s Day – Hey Crustie, Would you have sex with Louise Mensch? The magazine asked a load of Occupy protesters if they’d sleep with her (the answer was invariably “Yes”) and photographed their responses. As if the premise of the article isn’t disappointing enough, most disgustingly, one of the questions asked was “Would you shag her for revenge?” to which the response was “Yeah, she’s a Tory”. Too vile for words.

What does it mean to shag someone for revenge?  How does that differ from rape?  Or are they the same thing?  I get the impression that they are not the same thing but Googling doesn't give me a definition of "a revenge shag," either.

The point, of course, is that this treatment of Louise Mensch is equally applicable to any woman.  It's not ultimately about her political views at all.  It's about her gender.  That she is regarded as deserving such a treatment, because of her political views or whatever else she may have done does not change the fact that different political views by another woman would lend her equally vulnerable to the same trollery, albeit by different trolls.

A Deep Thought On Capitalism Gone Wild

It has gone wild.

That's the deep thought, and the reason is the demise of state-sponsored communism after the Berlin Wall fell.  Just cast your mind back and that is what happened.  Without the counter-force of communism the capitalists had no restraints and we got what we have now:  A world run as if it is a private corporation, a world run for the benefit of the capital-owners alone.  A privatized world.

It is ironic that communism was what kept the American type capitalism decent.  Without that public enemy the nazguls are free to rob and ravage.

I have always been a supporter of the mixed economy.  They still do much better.  Atrios quotes this, for example:

I asked the Swedish finance minister the other day how they made nationalised banks lend. He said to me: "It's simple. We own them, we tell them what to do and if the directors don't, we sack them and get people who can." That's what me must do.

This approach, my friends, is no longer possible in the United States because those who own the markets also now own the government.
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Added later:  An additional example from today:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Friday issued a proposed rule governing hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas on public lands that will for the first time require disclosure of the chemicals used in the process. 

But in a significant concession to the oil industry, companies will have to reveal the composition of fluids only after they have completed drilling, not before — a sharp change from the government’s original proposal, which would have required disclosure of the chemicals 30 days before a well could be started. 

Bolding mine.

In Today's Nazgûl News: Scott Walker's Adventures in Wisconsin

From the very first time I saw governor Scott Walker's face, especially his eyes, I knew he was a Nazgûl , one of the ringwraiths from the Lord of the Ring.  The other ringwraiths took over other states at the same time, but Walker is the one who has hogged most of the limelight.

And he has carried his assigned tasks out extremely well!  The great state of Wisconsin has almost been demolished!  In the good news, angry drivers can now have guns in their cars, there's no longer any of that gender-equality crap in state-based equal pay laws,  and the state ranked the first in increased unemployment and job loss misery last year!  

Governor Walker should be proud.  That he is facing a recall battle doesn't matter, because ringwraiths get their funding from their overlords and overladies:

Gov. Scott Walker raised an unprecedented $13.2 million over three months to fight off the recall bid against him, outdistancing his Democratic challengers and driving home the challenge they will have in beating the Republican incumbent.
Crisscrossing the country on fundraising trips, Walker has raised more than $25 million since January 2011 and has $4.9 million in cash on hand - numbers unlike any that have been seen for a political candidate in Wisconsin. Two-thirds of Walker's money came from out of state.
His stores of cash dwarf what his Democratic rivals have raised. But a report filed Monday showed an independent group supporting Democrat Kathleen Falk received $4.5 million, nearly all of it from unions and about a third of it from out of state.
Walker's fundraising is on par with that of second-tier presidential candidates. For instance, Rick Santorum raised $18.5 million between Jan. 1 and March 31, and Newt Gingrich raised a little less than $10 million during that period.
Walker has been able to raise so much because of the national appeal he developed with conservatives after his high-profile fight with labor unions and a quirk in Wisconsin law that allows unlimited fundraising while recalls are pending.

 ....

The Democrats raised little compared with Walker. Falk, a former Dane County executive, raised $977,000 and had $118,000 on hand. Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett raised $831,500 and had $475,500 on hand.
Barrett didn't get into the governor's race until March 30 - 2½ months after Falk - but had nearly $500,000 to start, left over from his recent mayoral campaign.
Barrett is vying with Falk to win the May 8 Democratic primary and take on Walker in the general recall election June 5. Also running as Democrats are Secretary of State Doug La Follette and state Sen. Kathleen Vinehout of Alma.

It is hilarious.  The best democracy money can buy, and most of it from out of state and from a few large donors:

Conservative billionaire Diane Hendricks gave Walker $500,000. Hendricks co-founded Beloit-based ABC Supply, a roofing wholesaler and siding distributor, with her husband, Ken, who died in a 2007 fall.
Her donation was the single largest ever to a gubernatorial candidate in the state and tied the $500,000 given to Walker over recent months by Bob Perry, owner of Houston-based Perry Homes and a chief backer of the Swift Boat Veterans ads against Democrat John Kerry in the 2004 race for president.
"Wisconsin's never seen anything like this kind of money," said Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause in Wisconsin. "This is all to persuade a relatively tiny universe of undecided voters. It'll be the highest cost per voter spent in the history of the nation in terms of the cost of persuading people."
A Journal Sentinel analysis showed that $4.4 million of Walker's money, or a third of the total, came from Wisconsin donors. The rest came from out of state.
Normally, donors can give a maximum of $10,000 to a candidate for governor. But from the time recall petitions are taken out to the time a recall election is called, donors can give any amount.
No fundraising limit was in place for Walker for about two-thirds of the period covered in the latest report. The Democrats had to follow the normal fundraising limits the whole time because they were not the targets of a recall.
In addition to the $500,000 donation from Hendricks, Walker received two $250,000 donations in the latest period. One came from Las Vegas Sands president Sheldon Adelson, a billionaire casino mogul who, along with his wife, put $17.5 million into Winning the Future, a super PAC supporting Gingrich.
Also giving $250,000 was Richard DeVos, the co-founder of the parent company of direct marketing firm Amway. DeVos has been active in the school voucher movement, and Walker last year expanded Milwaukee's voucher program and established a similar one in eastern Racine County.
Five people gave the governor $100,000 each - John Childs of Massachusetts, chairman of private equity firm J.W. Childs Associates; Warren Stephens of Arkansas, chairman of financial services company Stephens Inc.; Robert Kern, founder of Waukesha power-generating firm Generac; his wife, Patricia Kern; and Patrick Ryan of Illinois, CEO of insurance firm Ryan Specialty Group.

So why am I so hard on one poor ringwraith?  Probably because he is so blatant in his goals and so destructive in his achievements, because he looks like a puppet with the strings held in only a few gold-ringed pudgy hands?  Because he makes a mockery out of democracy?

I'm not sure.  And of course I'm kidding about him being a Nazgûl .  Right?

Men's Problems? The Fault of Women, Naturally.

Fraser has written two posts (here and here)  on one of those pieces about what's-the-problem-with-men, the ones which always produce hundreds of misogynistic comments*.  Because the obvious response to any problem about men is to argue that it's really the fault of women.

Thus, if boys have trouble at school it's the fault of schools which favor the way girls learn (never mind that schools were initially created for boys and have used the same learning structures ever since).  If men don't go to college in the same percentages as women, it is the fault of American feminists indoctrination which has turned men off from education and destroyed their self-confidence.  Never mind that the phenomenon is global, that even in Saudi Arabia the majority of college graduates are women.

And if men move back to their parents and spend time playing computer games and watching pron, that, too is the fault of women who don't save themselves for marriage and who don't understand that women must be dependent on men's earnings to deserve marriage.

Do read the comments to the original article, especially if you believe misogyny is nonexistent. One of the comments mentions the stretched-out vaginas of women who have bedded too many men to be worthy for the glorious role of being the commenting asshole's wife.

Pay attention to the fact that those comments were moderated.  This particular one passed moderation.  It presumably is regarded as pertinent to the topic.  Just imagine what the comments must have been like which did not pass moderation!

I'm very curious about the thinking behind the editors who choose these pieces, especially given the misogyny fest they always provide.  Perhaps very few newspapers or magazines regard women as among their customers? 

Nah.  They like this shit.  They like the idea of providing a safe nest for the hatred of all women.  One must, after all, provide a voice for all the haters,  too.  That the misogynists cannot be engaged, that they attack anyone arguing back (however calmly and scientifically),  that the debate degenerates into nothing but name-calling from their part,  none of that matters as much as the click numbers and the advertising revenue.
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*The original article was published in early March.

Squash It Like A Cockroach

Today's child-rearing advice, from a Christianist minister:

"So your little son starts to act a little girlish when he is four years old and instead of squashing that like a cockroach and saying, 'Man up, son, get that dress off you and get outside and dig a ditch, because that is what boys do,' you get out the camera and you start taking pictures of Johnny acting like a female and then you upload it to YouTube and everybody laughs about it and the next thing you know, this dude, this kid is acting out childhood fantasies that should have been squashed.
Dads, the second you see your son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist. Man up. Give him a good punch. Ok? You are not going to act like that. You were made by God to be a male and you are going to be a male. And when your daughter starts acting too butch, you reign her in. And you say, 'Oh, no, sweetheart. You can play sports. Play them to the glory of God. But sometimes you are going to act like a girl and walk like a girl and talk like a girl and smell like a girl and that means you are going to be beautiful. You are going to be attractive. You are going to dress yourself up.'

It's a real problem for these folk.  It's all supposed to be essentialist, whether determined by some divine party or the weirder type  of evolutionary psychology.  But at the same time you gotta beat it into the children.  Not to mention the fact that this roaring and yelling gentleman (audio at the link)  usurps the right to define what being male or female might mean.

In the Left Corner: Motherhood. In the Right Corner: Feminism. Let The Fight Begin!

After writing this post I have no patience with mummy/mommy wars, none whatsoever.  Even when they are ignited kindly and carefully as is the case in this New York Times debate series.

I wonder if it would work for you, too?  Go and read my earlier post and then read the installments in that debate.  This one:

The U.S. publication of “The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women” by the French feminist Elisabeth Badinter is getting a lot of attention in the press; indeed, it’s a book club feature on the Motherlode blog in The New York Times.
Is Badinter right? Has women’s obsession with being the perfect mother destroyed feminism? In particular, has this trend of “attachment parenting” been bad for working moms?

Of course attachment parenting (or home schooling, say), by mothers alone, destroys their ability to earn any money for themselves and the bargaining power which comes with that money.  Of course.  Whether that is bad for feminism depends on what one means by feminism.

But the real story is something quite different.  It's based on a few words in that blurb:

"Women's obsession with being the perfect mother."

Such a beautiful group of words!  And not a lie.  In fact, they have a perfectly clear meaning.  But note all those creatures swimming deep below those clear surface waters, deep in the muddy undertow:

It's mothering that requires attachment parenting now, not fathering, whatever we call the philosophy.  It's women who do parenting, not men, and there is one perfect way of parenting.  Only women are obsessed with that perfect way, not the rest of the society!

Nope, you are imagining that continuing commentary of how much children suffer when mother go out to work (latchkeys, juvenile delinquency).   Nope, you have never read warning stories about bad daycare givers.   Nope,  you never read that article worrying about stay-at-home mothers having a glass of wine during the daytime.  Nope, there are no articles about how bad mothering is punished in this country, beginning with the women who are addicted while pregnant.  Nope, you never heard someone tell a story about childhood mishap when the listener chipped in with "And where was your mother?" 

Indeed, if you have imagined any of those things then you are "obsessed" with how to be a perfect mother. 

It's the frame I cannot abide any longer.  The frame is stupid, it is destructive and it makes most everything else into one of those invisible elephants.  I get the utility of asking a few questions about phenomena such as attachment parenting and home-schooling from the point of view of women's rights and lives.  That's not done very often.

But mostly the framing stinks to high heavens.  Like the Mommy/Mummy Wars in general.

What I Learned On The Net And Wish I Had Not...

I picked up Sheri Tepper's Gibbon's Decline and Fall (1996) to look for a specific reference and got stuck re-reading parts of it.  I remembered the way I felt about the book when it first came out:  It seemed exaggerated in ways it did not intend and the misogynists in it came across pretty artificial in the things they said.  Indeed, I was uncomfortable with that book, thinking that it went too far.

But when I re-read some of it recently the statements she put into the mouths of the woman-hating villains in the book sound familiar and natural!  That's because I have now come across them on those "manosphere" hate sites.

This suggests to me that either life imitates art or (which is more likely) Tepper by 1996 had seen enough misogynistic statements to know how they sound.  Given that she worked for a well-known and well-hated women's health organization  the latter is more likely.

Austerity For Some, Bad Macroeconomic Theories For Others

Paul Krugman writes about that austerity business today (as he has done many times in the past).  How austerity could result in an economic recovery requires an extremely odd reading of economic theories. 

How that reading became the mainstream take would be worth a book or two.  How the lessons of the Great Depression could be so completely forgotten, how Maynard Keynes got dropped into the dustbins of history, all that deserves a proper explanation.   But we are not going to get one.

Instead, we will see the general trend of "failing upwards" or at least of "failing in place."  The costs of having been wrong are miniscule, both for the experts and for those popularizing the expert opinions.  It is only now that the costs of austerity are clearer that a few protesting voices are getting prominence.

Remember the "Irish miracle?"  I recall reading about it and trying to understand what might be driving such a miracle, given that Ireland had no unusual natural resources, no greater knowledge basis than other comparable countries and no lower labor costs than, say, Eastern European countries.

I concluded that the miracle was a bubble.  That bubble has now burst, but that's not the whole explanation for countries like Ireland, Greece and Spain.

The austerity politics have made things worse.  Much, much worse.  And countries belonging to the European Union no longer have access to many old macroeconomic tools, such as subsidies for export industries, tariffs on imports or the devaluation of currencies.  They are left with limited tools to cope with giant problems.

Unexceptionalism: A Primer.

That would be the title of E.L. Doctorow's fierce opinion piece in the New York Times.  That the piece appeared in the Times is in itself fairly astonishing.  True voices of the real left (rather than milquetoast centrists) are mostly excluded from all the polite places such as rowdy political commentary and political television shows and the pages of the New York Times or the Washington Post (once great newspapers, the both of them, and I hope they will return to such a status).

The same distinction applies to gender debates.  Those debates can have the most extreme conservative views, sure, but they cannot have a single militant feminist or even an actual liberal feminist (someone who has studied history and theory and so on).

These exclusions distort the debate.  The allowable extremism at the conservative end is much further out than the allowable extremism at the liberal end.  This makes the "center" skip happily rightwards.

Thus, I welcome this opinion piece.  We need these debates wider than they have allowed to be.

But I'm not sure whether I like the idea of American exceptionalism or the exceptionalism of any particular country, because once Americans, say, think of themselves as exceptional then there's nothing that could be learned from other countries! 

The wheel must be reinvented, again and again.  Nope, the fact that single-payer systems work in health care in other countries (Canada, say) is irrelevant, because we Murkans are exceptional! 

Flaming-At-The-Mouth Conservatives

Thomas J. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein have written an opinion piece about the comity chasm between conservatives and liberals and even between Republicans and Democrats in politics. 

I have written about that many, many times, sigh.  But Washington Post has not which makes all this newsworthy. 

The underlying problem was beautifully shown in a cartoon some years ago where two (fairly representative) guests in a political program were portrayed, a conservative and a wishy-washy milquetoast Democrat.  The latter baa-baaed like a sheep but whenever the former opened his mouth, flames spewed out.  And that is how it has been, for a long time.

Mann and Ornstein:

Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican, was recently captured on video asserting that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party. Of course, it’s not unusual for some renegade lawmaker from either side of the aisle to say something outrageous. What made West’s comment — right out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1950s — so striking was the almost complete lack of condemnation from Republican congressional leaders or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential candidates.
It’s not that the GOP leadership agrees with West; it is that such extreme remarks and views are now taken for granted.
We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

Indeed, those extreme views are taken for granted, but only from the right-wing.  We have slowly slipped into the expectation that rudeness, exaggeration and lies are perfectly acceptable, but only from conservatives or Tea Partiers or others of that ilk.  They are not even seen as rudeness, exaggeration or lies.  Do a few reversals inside your head and all this becomes obvious.

The WaPo opinion piece urges the media to drop their false equivalency games, the ones where each side of the political aisle is portrayed as being equally hostile, equally rude and equally extreme in its views.   Those are like arguing that anyone who has ever had a verbal row with a neighbor over a dividing fence is as bad as someone who beat a neighbor to unconsciousness.

I get the problem from the media point of view, I do.  It's scary to talk back to very rude people, especially if they are powerful and can cut you out, and the false equivalency games make journalists appear neutral.  Except that they are not, because the initial situation is not neutral.

The really fascinating question concerns the underlying reasons for the ideological changes in the Republican Party.  The current party would not accept Richard Nixon but would probably suspect him of membership in the Communist Party.  Are these changes because of Rush Limbaugh and others like him taking over the radio waves?  In short, is the wrath and bitterness that all this reflects manufactured or is it reflective of a real radicalization in American conservatives?

And if the latter, is there anything the Democratic Party could have done to stem the tide?  My guess is that the push for globalization by both parties in the 1990s has something to do with the ability of the hate-mongers to succeed.  Jobs left the country, people suffered, and president Clinton signed NAFTA.  Trade unions have been de-fanged, the median real earnings of Americans have not increased for a long time.  Add to that the collapse of the housing market and the most recent recession.  What is the message for the Democrats to those who struggle?

The Republican messages are about conspiracy theories (do NOT look at the powerful people with money, look at those uppity minorities, women and immigrants)  and ultimately propose feudal solutions which would make things even worse.  Indeed, much (if not most) of the reasons for the free-floating anger among Republican voters is caused by Republican policies.  But those voters are not told that on the radio, and if they watch Fox News they won't hear it on the television, either.

Discrimination Against Women in Individual Health Insurance Policies. A Boring Post.

Sean Hannity interviewed the health care expert (joking) Michelle Malkin on the question whether health insurance discriminates against women or not:

This week, Fox News host Sean Hannity scoffed at the idea that women face discriminatory practices from the health insurance industry, arguing that it is "disinformation" to claim that repeal of the health care reform law, which bans such practices, will again subject women to unfair and discriminatory treatment by insurers. In fact, the law bans insurance companies from its current practice of charging women higher premiums for the same coverage as men, and forbids insurers from listing pregnancy as a pre-existing condition, which was often used by some providers as an excuse to deny coverage.

The video ends before Malkin gives us any pertinent data on that "distortion."

It isn't a distortion, though the overall situation is slightly more complicated.  Women who are covered through employer-based group policies do not have to pay higher premia just because they are women.  This is because those health insurance policies fall under employment law, and charging women higher premia would mean that they get a smaller total compensation for their work than an otherwise identically placed but male employee.

Things can be different when it comes to individual health insurance policies, those which a person contracts separately with an insurer.  Some states do not allow the companies to charge women more, just on the basis of gender, but some states allow it.  And the practice does exist, wherever it is allowed.

What motivates it?  The reasoning is based on the fact that the average woman consumes more health care than the average man.  Most of this difference has to do with fertility differences.  In some ways the health care consumption which really should be attributed to babies being born is attributed to women, for example, but much of women's greater use has to do with routine gyno checkups, pap smear and breast screenings and so on.  So far we don't expect men to get routine prostate checkups every year from early ages onward.

Whether women would still consume more than men, on average, if the obstetric/gynecological visits were excluded is unclear to me.  Perhaps, given that many experts believe that men, on average, do not see their doctors often enough.

Insurance companies and plans will use the higher average use rates of women as the basis for charging women more than men for the same policies if they are allowed to do so.  This is an example of statistical discrimination, by the way, and of a very odd type, because someone loses and someone gains (in an unfair way) whether the premia are allowed to differ between men and women or whether they are not.

To see why, note that if women and men are charged the same premia, then as a group women will consume more health care for the same cost.  One could argue that women (as a class) benefit and men (as a class) lose under this scenario (if we ignore the consumption having to do with giving birth which probably should not be attributed to women alone).

But if men are charged less for the same policies than women,  then all high-using men benefit and all low-using women get hurt.

What makes this particular example even more complicated is this:  Women's greater use of health care is something which disappears with age.  Indeed, the rank-order changes when people age, and at older ages the average man consumes more in dollar figures.  But guess what happens then?

Medicare soon takes over and it does not charge higher premia by gender.  This means that when we would expect the premia of those individual health care policies to become higher for men, based on statistical evidence,  the state takes over.

This type of statistical discrimination is very complex.  Other examples exist in car insurance where young men are charged higher premia than young women, for the same coverage.  The rationale is similar:  Young men, as a group, have higher accident rates than young women, as a group.  If all young drivers were charged the same premium,  young female drivers, as a class, would pay more for the same total compensations than young male drivers, as a class.  But the practice of charging young male drivers more discriminates against careful young men and benefits reckless young women.

The car insurance example does differ from the health insurance example, because the former has to do with behavior which can be affected, at least in theory, whereas the latter may be about one's basic medical needs, as defined by gender.  Thus, one could argue that the ethical concerns in the two cases are different.

This has been your long-and-boring post of the day.  Enjoy!

I Waz A Poor Boy...

This article about the humble beginnings of president Obama and the financial struggles of Mitt Romney's family really is quite hilarious.  Sure, they try to connect with voters who are mostly not rich people. 

But what makes the piece hilarious to me is that neither Obama nor Romney are poor as adults.  Come to think of it,  politicians are pretty loaded:

While millions of Americans saw their incomes decrease, their job opportunities dissipate and their home values drop as the economy dipped, the 535 men and women they elected to represent them in the U.S. Congress were not only shielded from the economic downturn but  gained during it.
The average American’s net worth has dropped 8 percent during the past six years, while members of Congress got, on average, 15 percent richer, according to a New York Times analysis of financial disclosure.  The median net worth of members of Congress  is about $913,000, compared with about $100,000 for the country at large, the Times’ analysis found.
This wealth disparity between lawmakers and the people they represent seems to be continually growing. Nearly half of Congress — 249 members  — are millionaires, while only 5 percent of American households can make the same claim.

That's the real problem with politicians.  Not their humble or not-so-humble roots but the fact that it's considerably easier to enter into politics if one is independently wealthy to begin with.  And independently wealthy people are, by definition, somewhat removed from the realities of scraping together a living.

The Eltahawy Fire Storm And Other Pertinent Issues

Mona Eltahawy's article on the status of women in Arab countries,  Why Do They Hate Us? has created a fire storm.  I wrote about the piece earlier, before the many responses were available.

When I read Eltahawy's piece I tried to understand the identity of the misogynists, the "they" in her article title.  Is it Arab men?  That's how the fire storm has interpreted her message, and that's also the general flavor of the piece.  But she makes specific comments which differ from that reading:

So: Yes, women all over the world have problems; yes, the United States has yet to elect a female president; and yes, women continue to be objectified in many "Western" countries (I live in one of them). That's where the conversation usually ends when you try to discuss why Arab societies hate women. 

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Not a single Arab country ranks in the top 100 in the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report, putting the region as a whole solidly at the planet's rock bottom. Poor or rich, we all hate our women. 

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"Why extremists always focus on women remains a mystery to me," U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said recently. "But they all seem to. It doesn't matter what country they're in or what religion they claim. They want to control women." 

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How much does Saudi Arabia hate women? So much so that 15 girls died in a school fire in Mecca in 2002, after "morality police" barred them from fleeing the burning building -- and kept firefighters from rescuing them -- because the girls were not wearing headscarves and cloaks required in public. And nothing happened. No one was put on trial. Parents were silenced. The only concession to the horror was that girls' education was quietly taken away by then-Crown Prince Abdullah from the Salafi zealots, who have nonetheless managed to retain their vise-like grip on the kingdom's education system writ large.
This, however, is no mere Saudi phenomenon, no hateful curiosity in the rich, isolated desert. The Islamist hatred of women burns brightly across the region -- now more than ever.

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The hatred of women goes deep in Egyptian society. 

All bolds are mine.

Indeed, there's only one actual quote where the haters are identified as men:

Enter that call to prayer and the sublimation through religion that Rifaat so brilliantly introduces in her story. Just as regime-appointed clerics lull the poor across the region with promises of justice -- and nubile virgins -- in the next world rather than a reckoning with the corruption and nepotism of the dictator in this life, so women are silenced by a deadly combination of men who hate them while also claiming to have God firmly on their side.

This may be nit-picking,  but it is interesting that the responses all assume a simpler interpretation of Eltahawy's thesis:  That she is blaming Arab men alone.

I recommend reading the responses (especially those here).  Many of them make important points about the dangers of generalizing to all Arab men and women or all countries,  many of them also point out that Arab women are not just helpless victims of oppression but also activists who fight it and that Arab men can also be activists fighting against the oppression of women.

But I do take issue with this counter-argument:

Yes, in Saudi Arabia women cannot drive, but men cannot elect their government, instead they are ruled over by a religiously opportunistic dynasty. In Egypt, it's true that women were subjected to virginity tests, but men were sodomised. In Sudan women are lashed for wearing trousers, but ethnic minorities are also marginalised and under assault. We must not belittle the issues women face, or relegate them to second place, but we must place them in a wider context where wholesale reform is needed. One cannot reduce a much more universal and complicated problem merely to gender.

It is certainly true that men cannot elect their government in Saudi Arabia.   But Saudi women cannot elect their government AND they cannot drive.  In Sudan, women are lashed for wearing trousers AND women who belong to ethnic minorities are marginalized and under assault.  And if women in Egypt were not sodomized, they certainly could be.

I focus on this particular example because it is also common in American anti-feminist writings where it usually takes the form "everybody has it tough."  The problem is that in many cases (though not all) being a woman does not pardon one from also belonging to that group "everybody." 

Max Fisher at the Atlantic Monthly offers tentative theories about the origins of misogyny and the possible impact of the Ottoman empire and Western colonialization on the current values of Arab societies.  He also writes about the concerns that articles of this type could be used to support an anti-Islam hate stance and questions whether Eltahawy's voice is a helpful one, given the context:

Spend some time in the Middle East or North Africa talking about gender and you might hear the expression, "My Arab brother before my Western sister," a warning to be quiet about injustice so as not to give the West any more excuses to condescend and dictate. The fact that feminism is broadly (and wrongly) considered a Western idea has made it tougher for proponents. After centuries of Western colonialism, bombings, invasions, and occupation, Arab men can dismiss the calls for gender equality as just another form of imposition, insisting that Arab culture does it differently. The louder our calls for gender equality get, the easier they are to wave away.
Eltahawy's personal background, unfortunately, might play into this more than she probably realizes. She lives mostly in the West, writes mostly for Western publications, and speaks American-accented English, all of which complicates her position and risks making her ideas seem as Westernized as she is. That's neither fair nor a reflection of the merit of her ideas, but it might inform the backlash, and it might tell us something about why the conversation she's trying to start has been stalled for so long.

I referred to this problem in my earlier post on Why Do They Hate Us, and here it is in a much more open form:

In her column, Eltahawy cleverly weaves a web of torture and oppression against Arab women, with pictures of black-painted covered-up women planted throughout the article, to accentuate this image of oppression. Everything, from virginity tests, to sexual deprivation, female genital mutilation, sexual harassment and child marriage, is included in this article to produce a column that will surely be welcomed by many Western feminists and anti-Islamists, who for years have been telling us that Muslim women are weak, oppressed victims of misogyny and rigid Islamic rules that force them to hide behind their veils.

But for many Arab women (I say many based on the negative reaction Eltahawy's column has already stirred), this column is offensive and is nothing but a combination of old cultural practices and undemocratic government actions that are described in a way to represent women as the Oriental Other, weak, helpless and submissive, oppressed by Islam and the Muslim male, this ugly, barbaric monster. Yes, women everywhere face diverse challenges. Arab women have their own fair share of issues, but to claim that these are problems of hate is deceiving. 

Indeed.  Just Google "farewell intercourse law" if you wish to see how uncritically Western press often accepts the oddest bits of rumor about the Muslim world:

Today, Egypt's state-owned Al Ahram newspaper published an opinion piece by Amr Abdul Samea, a past stalwart supporter of the deposed Hosni Mubarak, that contained a bombshell: Egypt's parliament is considering passing a law that would allow husbands to have sex with their wives after death. 

It was soon mentioned in an English language version of Al-Arabiya and immediately started zipping around social-networking sites. By this afternoon it had set news sites and the rest of the Internet on fire. It has every thing: The yuck factor, "those creepy Muslims" factor, the lulz factor for those with a sick sense of humor. The non-fact-checked Daily Mail picked it up and reported it as fact. Then Andrew Sullivan, who has a highly influential blog but is frequently lax about fact-checking, gave it a boost with an uncritical take. The Huffington Post went there, too.

There's of course one problem: The chances of any such piece of legislation being considered by the Egyptian parliament for a vote is zero. And the chance of it ever passing is less than that. In fact, color me highly skeptical that anyone is even trying to advance a piece of legislation like this through Egypt's parliament. I'm willing to be proven wrong. It's possible that there's one or two lawmakers completely out of step with the rest of parliament. Maybe.

That's pretty bad.  On the other hand, the Al-Arabiya piece mentions other possible proposals and nobody has suggested that they, too, might be hoaxes:

Egypt’s National Council for Women (NCW) has appealed to the Islamist-dominated parliament not to approve two controversial laws on the minimum age of marriage and allowing a husband to have sex with his dead wife within six hours of her death according to a report in an Egyptian newspaper. 

The appeal came in a message sent by Dr. Mervat al-Talawi, head of the NCW, to the Egyptian People’s Assembly Speaker, Dr. Saad al-Katatni, addressing the woes of Egyptian women, especially after the popular uprising that toppled president Hosni Mubarak in February 2011.

She was referring to two laws: one that would legalize the marriage of girls starting from the age of 14 and the other that permits a husband to have sex with his dead wife within the six hours following her death.

...

Many members of the newly-elected, and majority Islamist parliament, have been accused of launching attacks against women’s rights in the country.

They wish to cancel many, if not most, of the laws that promote women’s rights, most notably a law that allows a wife to obtain a divorce without obstructions from her partner. The implementation of the Islamic right to divorce law, also known as the Khula, ended years of hardship and legal battles women would have to endure when trying to obtain a divorce. 

Egyptian law grants men the right to terminate a marriage, but grants women the opportunity to end an unhappy or abusive marriages without the obstruction of their partner. Prior to the implementation of the Khula over a decade ago, it could take 10 to 15 years for a woman to be granted a divorce by the courts.

Islamist members of Egyptian parliament, however, accuse these laws of “aiming to destroy families” and have said it was passed to please the former first lady of the fallen regime, Suzanne Mubarak, who devoted much of her attention to the issues of granting the women all her rights. 


Untangle those knots if you can.  Is gender equality something pertinent only to Western cultures?  What is the proper role of Western feminists in this context?  Do we write too much on women and Islam as one of the above quotes suggests?  Are we in cahoots with the anti-Islamists?

Or do we write far too little on those questions as many on the right argue, with the implication that Western (and especially US) feminists are in cahoots with the Islamists because we routinely criticize the Catholic Church or the fundie boyz of Christianity but are relatively silent (in recent years) when it comes to Islam?

Wherein Echidne Doesn't Have A Sense of Humor

This is a neat example of that old canard about feminists/liberals/whoever not having a sense of humor:

Fox News political and foreign affairs analyst Monica Crowley reacted to a report that Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke got engaged to her boyfriend by tweeting: "To a man?"

Following criticism of her on Twitter, Crowley wrote: "I love exposing the Left's total lack of a sense of humor."
As Media Matters has documented, Fluke has come under vicious attack by conservatives following her testimony before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee. Most infamously, Rush Limbaugh called Fluke a "slut" and a "prostitute."

Or put it in different terms:  If you don't have the same basic beliefs, the ones which make you go bwahahah! then you don't have a sense of humor.

In this case there is no joke without certain basic beliefs.  Indeed, Crowley's statement makes no real sense for someone who doesn't know the backstory about Sandra Fluke:  That she gave testimony about the question whether Catholic universities cause hardship if the insurance policies they offer do not cover the contraceptive pill.

But even knowing that doesn't explain the joke to someone without certain basic beliefs, unless one assumes that the joke is a surrealist one.

No.  To get the joke you need to know something about what  the basic beliefs of Monica Crowley might be about feminists or women who speak up on these types of questions.  If you know those then you get why she thinks her statement is funny.

All this is quite trivial.  But knowing what it means when someone accuses you of not having a sense of humor (assuming that you do have one) can be helpful.  It's mostly about a demand that the underlying basic beliefs  should be shared.

It's the most effective responses that are trickier.  I've had some success by using reversals and then demanding that people get the humor in those, too.

Frat Boyz Vs. Geeks: New Models of Masculinity In the IT Industry

This Mother Jones article talks about a new model for selling programming jobs:

Many of the dozen or so people I interviewed for this story pointed to the rise of the brogrammer—a term that seeks to recast the geek identity with a competitive frat house flavor. The essence of it comes through in comments on the question-and-answer site Quora. "How Does a Programmer Become a Brogrammer?": Brogrammers "rage at the gym, to attract the chicks and scare the dicks!" They "can work well under the tightest deadlines, or while receiving oral sex." And they have their priorities straight: "If a girl walks past in a see-through teddy, and you don't even look up because you're neck-deep in code, expect to spend a lot of time celibate no matter how bro you go."

The obvious problem with that approach is twofold:  It assumes that programmers are only  men (though there is a hogrammer term for women if they want it!) and it assumes women are sorta like bottles of beer or ham sammiches.

I have no idea how common this brogramming trend is.   But stories like this one are a healthy (?) reminder of one of the reasons why women might have trouble entering certain male-dominated industries.  Imagine being the only woman in a room full of brogrammers.  What might they think you are there for?  If they believe in the brogrammer ideas, that is.

Just Hand Over Those Cookies

And no-one will get hurt!

Just kidding. But I'm tired, what with all the wonderful posts I have written recently and I deserve some cookies. Especially chocolate chip cookies or spice cookies. I had a wonderful spice cookie recipe which I have lost. It included cloves and cardamom and the cookies were just the thing to dip in coffee. If you happen to have that recipe, please may I have it?

Or any other great cookie recipes.  Both those which take eons to prepare and quickie ones.  Especially those which are not too sweet.  I don't have a really sweet tooth/fang.

For Readers Abroad

Several of you have trouble reading the comments and with the formatting of this blog.  The cause has to do with Blogger.

Shakespeare's sister offers one solution which might work.  Here's Google's answer.

The Invisible Elephants

I've often written about them. They are the missing ones in the political picture, the groups which become invisible, the arguments which are not raised. It's like a family picture, with people sitting on the couch, smiling, and in the very middle of it is that blank space. That's where the invisible elephant sits. We can't see it but something about that blank space bothers us.

This theme is common whenever we discuss, say, parenting. We mean mothering, not parenting, despite the euphemism, and that tends to result in fathers becoming that invisible elephant. The articles read connected, even logical, and yet there's something odd about them, something missing. Once you spot the elephant, that slight discomfort you feel starts making sense.

Other examples abound, of course. A recent one has to do with the way the economic crises are covered. The supply-side of the economy gets the major focus, the demand side gets little attention and practically never as one of the so-called Job Creators.

The invisible elephant in that context is the power of consumers and why proper earnings levels for ordinary people are the real job-creation foundation of any economy. But the articles often focus on supply-side concerns, covering consumers and workers only as passive recipients of the good and the bad the economy doles out to them. Including unemployment, the tightening of the belt etc.

This particular elephant is invisible in a subtle way. It is excluded because of the dominant economic frames of reference which regard the supply side as active, as a first-mover, and the demand side as passive, as the follower. Likewise, the dominant frame of reference concentrates on changes in the top layers of the economic system: Should banks be given more freedom or less? Should financial market be regulated? Should we tax firms at all?

But the elephant is not excluded in the sense of consequences if that top layer doesn't get what it wants (bad things will happen!). In that context we see it smack in the middle of the couch, weeping sadly. That demand is a powerful collective force, powerful enough to lift an economy from recession, is the invisible form of this elephant.

Housekeeping

Blogger has recent changes which make it hard for me to keep paragraphs properly separated.  I hope the bug is fixed soon.  So apologies for any weird mergings or separations which shouldn't be there.

The commenting system this blog uses, Echo, will be discontinued on October 1, 2012.  What might replace it (if anything)?